Satirical fiction is becoming Blair's reality

The most influential books are always those that are not read. So says Michael Young, and he should know. His classic The Rise of the Meritocracy, published in 1958, endowed the language with a word which has been misinterpreted ever since. As he pointed out recently, hardly anyone seems to realise that the book is a satire, and that the society it envisaged is a doomed dystopia.

"I wanted to show how overweening a meritocracy could be," Young explained, "and indeed the people generally who thought they belonged to it, including the author to whom the book was attributed." Silly old sausage: didn't he realise that irony and satire will always be taken literally by at least half the people who read it, and by a far higher percentage of those blithering bratwursts who haven't read it at all but base their inferences on the title alone?

One such, I suspect, is our own prime minister. But this hasn't inhibited him from holding forth on the subject: "We are light years from being a true meritocracy" (July 1995); "I want a society based on meritocracy" (April 1997); "The Britain of the elite is over. The new Britain is a meritocracy"; (October 1997); "The old establishment is being replaced by a new, larger, more meritocratic middle class" (January 1999);"The meritocracy is built on the potential of the many, not the few" (October 1999); "The meritocratic society is the only one that can exploit its economic potential to the full for all its people" (June 2000).

Despite the obvious and comical contradictions - how could something that was "light years away" in 1995 have arrived a mere two years later? - Blair is at least consistent in never using the M-word pejoratively. Last week, however, a small caveat appeared for the first time. "In the past, the idea of meritocracy has been attacked," he declared in his Enfield speech. "But creating a society that is meritocratic is not wrong, it is just insufficient." But the qualification seems to be largely rhetorical: even if meritocracy is not enough, according to Blair, it is still "an indispensable part of building a decent and prosperous society" by "breaking down the barriers to success".

To Tony Blair, meritocracy is synonymous with equality of opportunity - and who could object to that? Well, Michael Young, to name but one. "I thought equality of opportunity, the way it was thought of and the way it is still thought of, was a baneful thing," he said a few years ago, in a radio interview marking the 40th anniversary of The Rise of the Meritocracy. "I saw the meritocracy as becoming less and less concerned with the main body of people, establishing a sort of culture of their own, an elite culture with a good deal of arrogance in it. These things have largely happened . . ."

Or, as he put it in his book, equality of opportunity tends to mean, in practice, equality of opportunity to be unequal. Lo and behold, the prime minister used the phrase again on Monday when presenting his plan to reintroduce a two-tier system of secondary schools. Far from "breaking down the barriers to success", meritocracy erects daunting new hurdles. Anyone who doubts this should read The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, in which Nicholas Lemann reveals how the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) was used to select the ruling class of post-war America.

In the days of aristocratic dominance, there were at least some in the upper class who felt insecure in their hereditary power, and many in the lower classes who refused to accept the legitimacy of their rule. But when merit alone reigns, and is almost universally accepted as the fairest arbiter, those in the elite entertain no doubts at all: they are there because they bloody well deserve to be. Those who lose out are condemned to helpless despair, stigmatised by their own alleged inadequacy.

And the new order soon becomes as stratified as the old. As TS Eliot, who was not exactly a loony lefty, wrote in his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture: "An elite, if it is a governing elite, so far as the natural impulse to pass on to one's offspring both power and prestige is not artificially checked, will tend to establish itself as a class." One obvious way of introducing an "artificial check" would be to challenge the influence of the public schools, but this Labour government - like all its predecessors - has no intention of doing so.

In Young's book, the British meritocracy eventually provokes an uprising of "populist" democrats opposed to a system which evaluates people only according to their intelligence, education, occupation and power, with little account given to qualities such as imagination, courage or generosity. Could there be a similar backlash against Blair's New Jerusalem?

Certainly not: Young's book was a satirical fantasy, as the author admits. It imagined a meritocratic society of huge and widening inequalities, with a technocratic superclass at the top and a sullen underclass below. It suggested that the new British elite would be not only unrepresentative but also more interested in consolidating its own power than in improving the common weal. It also predicted that by the 21st century the Labour party would have rebranded itself with a more "modern" name, and would set about abolishing comprehensive education. ("To us the failure of comprehensive schools does not seem to require explanation. We can hardly conceive of a society built upon consideration for the individual regardless of his merit, regardless of the needs of society as a whole.")

Even more absurdly, it envisaged a "progressive" government which stripped hereditary peers of their parliamentary privileges - only to replace them with life peers chosen from among the most eminent members of the new privileged class. "Skipping all the intermediate stages of democracy (as some countries have jumped straight from railways to rockets), an instrument of the aristocracy was by one brilliant stroke made an instrument of the meritocracy."

Pure fiction, thank God.

Look who's playing at star wars

At his press conference with Tony Blair last week, Jacques Chirac, the president of France, described the national missile defence system (NMD) as an "incitement to proliferation". Ever since men began waging war, he said, there has been a race between the sword and the shield. The more improvements that are made to the shield, the more improvements are made to the sword, "and history shows that the sword always wins". Blair made no comment; Robin Cook, who listened intently to Chirac's remarks, was seen to shake his head.

The only British minister who has publicly opposed this ridiculous American boon- doggle is Peter Hain. When asked about NMD on Newsnight last March, he replied: "I don't like the idea of a star wars programme, limited or unlimited." But in an interview with the Guardian last weekend, Hain said that although he still pays his annual CND subscription: "I happen not to agree with CND's line on the nuclear [sic] missile defence."

Oh well, if you say so. A rightwing French president is willing to denounce the greatest modern threat to nuclear disarmament, but a Labour government stuffed with former or current CND supporters - including Messrs Blair, Cook and Hain - won't say a word against it. If this is New Labour, give me a good old Gaullist any day.

Sun turns pale pink

Now I've seen it all, having read Monday's editorial in the Sun. "Here at the Sun we are not (surprise, surprise) Marxists, but we understand why old Karl got so angry. It's 153 years since the communist manifesto came out. In some ways, little has changed since then."

In tomorrow's Sun, a leader-writer will use Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to explain why it is impossible to give simultaneous accurate measurements of the position and momentum of stunning Melanie Cotton's breasts. And don't miss an exclusive series next week: Occam's Razor - The Solution to Problem Nasal Hair?